self-critical - Story 127693 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The congratulatory phone call from the boss seemed to echo in his ears, a constant reminder of what he hadn’t achieved. He sat at his desk, staring out the window, his mind replaying the interview, dissecting every answer, every gesture. He saw himself, awkward and hesitant, compared to his competitor, radiant and assured.

He spent the weekend mired in a pit of discontent, comparing his situation to hers, itemizing what he had and what he lacked. He skipped his usual Saturday bike ride, claiming he was too busy, but really he couldn't face the sunlight, the joy that seemed to emanate from everyone else.

He could only see the perceived shortcomings, the mistakes, the moments where he hadn't been good enough. He felt a constant pressure in his chest.

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion self-critical. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 self-critical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the self-critical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280